Siegfried and Roy with a white lion
Photo: Wikipedia
It was on this day ten years ago that the final performance of famed duo Siegfried & Roy was staged at the Mirage Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. Under most circumstances this would have been a grand finale to a long-standing show, planned months in advance and full of the sweet melancholy of closure.
Not so with this 35-year-running, iconic show. Siegfried & Roy, the self-proclaimed "Masters of the Impossible", performed a high stakes magic show that featured live big cats appearing and vanishing from the stage. Their performance was particularly famous for the use of white tigers and lions. According to all reports the animals were treated with the utmost care, and Roy himself raised the all of the tiger cubs by hand, training them through what he called "affection conditioning". There was no abuse or mistreatment involved in the cats' care, which made this final performance all the more shocking:
Forty-five minutes into the show, at about 8:15 p.m., Roy led out Montecore, a seven-year-old white tiger born in Guadalajara, Mexico. The 380-pound cat became distracted by someone in the 1,500- member crowd and broke his routine, straying toward the edge of the stage. With no barrier protecting the audience, Roy leapt to put himself between Montecore and the front row, only a few feet away. The tiger kept coming. Roy gave him a command to lie down, and Montecore refused, gripping the trainer’s right wrist with his paw.
“He lost the chain [around the tiger's neck] and grabbed for it, but couldn’t get it,” says Tony Cohen, a Miami tourist who was sitting ten yards from the stage. With his free hand holding a wireless microphone, Roy tried repeatedly tapping Montecore on the head, the sound reverberating through the theater. “Release!” Roy commanded the tiger. “Release!”
Montecore relaxed his grip, but Roy had been straining to pull away, and fell backward over the tiger’s leg. In an instant, Montecore was on top of him, clamping his powerful jaws around Roy’s neck. Now Siegfried, standing nearby, ran across the stage yelling, “No, no, no!” But the tiger was resolute, and dragged his master 30 feet offstage “literally like a rag doll,” as another witness recalls. (http://www.rd.com/true-stories/survival/siegfried-and-roy-tiger-attack/)
The horrifying incident left Roy in critical condition. Montecore was placed in quarantine, and the show was cancelled indefinitely. Although Roy survived, the effects of the injury to his nervous system prevented him from ever returning to show business, and the duo retired from the industry.
The lingering question for animal behaviorists is what prompted Montecore to attack the man who had raised him:
Siegfried would later say that Roy had fallen ill from the effects of blood pressure pills; Montecore, he insisted, realized something was wrong and was only trying to protect Roy. But animal behaviorists put little stock into that notion. They say it’s more likely that Montecore was on his way to delivering a killing bite, much as a tiger in the wild would bring down an antelope.
Big cats, like most carnivores, have instinctual responses to certain stimuli. It's possible the Roy's sensory output triggered Montecore to react as he would to a wounded prey animal. Alternatively, the tiger may have perceived Roy's distress after falling and responded as a tiger would to another tiger--by attempting to lift him by the neck. This response would do no harm to a tiger but is clearly fatal to a human.
This incident was an immediate talking point for animal rights activists, who argued that the incident showed that performing big cats will lash out against those who keep them in captivity. This view seems unfounded, as the investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showed that the animals were well cared for (http://www.today.com/id/8391183/ns/today-today_entertainment/t/why-did-tiger-attack-roy-horn/#.Uk3pFG3CZ98). The only issue in the report was that the show presented undue danger to the audience without proper barriers.
Big cats in shows continues to be an issue of contention. Beyond the many cats still retained in private circuses and sideshows (many in far worse conditions than Siegfried & Roy's), many zoos continue to use live shows as a public attraction, justifying them as a form of animal enrichment. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) has put strict controls on the exposure of animal care staff to big cats, allowing only "protected contact" and only minimal "free contact" when necessary. Protected contact keeps staff safe from incidents like the one in Vegas, but it limits the degree to which staff can interact with cats and enrich their lives through operant conditioning. Is it better to maintain the safety of separation, or is it worth the risk to be able to provide cats with more enriched lives?
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